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Overclocking, Power & Temps

Up until now the new Syklake-X processors have looked mighty impressive. The 6-core 7800X sucks down the same 193 watts as the 8-core Ryzen 7 1800X -- I was hoping it would be closer to the 1600X. Still, the 7800X isn't really the issue, both the 8-core and 10-core models are considerably more power hungry.

Both pushed system consumption over 200 watts and that's significantly more power than what the 6950X system used. 226 watts is a huge amount of draw for the Excel test, let's move on and see what the power consumption figures for the Cinebench R15 test look like.

Okay so these numbers are even worse, quite a bit worse. The reason for this being that the Cinebench R15 test is not just more intensive, but it also runs for quite a bit longer so the chips heat up more and consume even more power. For this test the 7900X was sucking down almost 260 watts whereas the 6850X hit just 212 watts. Clearly those higher clock speeds come at a real cost.

Overclocking

Although our coverage is late we still haven't had much time to play with the new Core-X CPUs. They arrived only a few days ago so I've yet to do much overclocking beyond the 7900X. The results were mixed. My chip only managed a stable 4.6GHz and no matter how much voltage I threw at it I wasn't able to stress test . The system would boot into Windows but would blue screen within the first few moments of running a stress test. Stability might improve with future BIOS updates, or perhaps I just have a bit of a dud. Looking around the Internet it seems some are stuck at 4.6 GHz like me while others have managed to stabilize their system at 4.7 or 4.8 GHz.

The results were mixed, my chip only managed a stable 4.6GHz overclock, no matter how much voltage I threw at it I wasn't able to stabilize anything beyond that. The system would boot into Windows but would blue screen within the first few moments of running a stress test. Stability might improve with future BIOS updates, or perhaps I just have a dud. Looking around the Internet it seems others are also stuck at 4.6GHz like me while some folks have managed to stabilize their system at 4.7 or 4.8GHz.

However, the frequency isn't my greatest concern right now. Using just 1.2 volts, which is all I needed for a stable 4.6GHz overclock on all cores, the system consumption went from the 259 watts just seen to an insane 402 watts! That might not even be the worst part, the deal breaker is probably the operating temps. Chilling the 7900X was Corsair's H100i v2 and despite being a premium 240mm AIO liquid cooler, temps skyrocketed as the CPU was place under load, reaching 90 degrees instantly before climbing further towards 100 degrees. Unless you have an amazing cooler, I'm not sure overclocking is going to be worth it.